Marjorie Backman

The exhibition Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is what brought me to the International Center of Photography. After all, the wartime photos of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake are much celebrated today, historical artifacts in themselves. But I felt compelled to stay for The Day the Music Died, British photographer Edmund Clark’s eight video, music, and photography installations on the post-9/11“War on Terror” around the globe.

The ...

For Henri Cartier-Bresson, it was an ironic turn of events. When the first large photo book of the French photographer was simultaneously published in Paris and New York in 1952, its English title, The Decisive Moment, ended up telegraphing a meaning opposite to his intentions. The book’s French title, Images à la Sauvette, literally meaning “images on the run,” perfectly summed up his approach to photography: operating like a stealthy street
peddler without a license, capturing with his lens what he found.

Landscapes After Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime presents in its introductory text an intriguing proposition: “In a world overwhelmed by rapid technological advances, natural disasters, and a heightened sense of anxiety, it is still possible to find unexpected beauty.” Curated by New York photographer Joel Sternfeld and drawing on works from the Hall Art Foundation in Vermont, the exhibition at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery takes as its starting point the concept of the sublime in nat...

The New York-based YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which has held the fragile archives of the Bund since 1992, has announced a new initiative to make them more accessible to scholars and family researchers by digitizing and posting them online. Irene Pletka, the vice chairman of YIVO’s board, is kick-starting this effort with a reported pledge of $1 million, and after a $2.5 million to $3 million goal is reached, the institute will begin the first phase of digitization covering some 219 l...

The day after the early-morning surprise assault on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States formally declared war on Japan and entered World War II. Over the next few months, almost 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, over 60 percent of whom were American citizens, were removed from their homes, businesses and farms on the West Coast and forced to live in internment camps. Why?

New Web Portal Provides Access to Historic Material...

For the latest word on biographical museums, check out the newly revamped Benjamin Franklin Museum in Philadelphia. If it hasn’t shaken the “great man of history” myth entirely,

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw opened last month to great fanfare but no exhibitions for visitors to see. That all changed yesterday with the launch of its first temporary exhibiti...

When Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, or Jewish Community Vienna, decided to sell a vacant building in the summer of 2000, two employees were sent to look for any archival material that might have been left behind...

About a year before Anne Frank began her diary in June 1942, her father started a writing project of his own. Though most of the world now is familiar with Anne's private musings while her family was in hiding from Nazis, Wednesday's release of the Otto Frank file — whose discovery was first reported by TIME.com in January — by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City reveals yet another side of that family's life and what those who tried to survive the Holocaust were facing.
T...

Two summers ago, Estelle Guzik, a volunteer archivist at New York City's YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, came across a curious file previously not indexed: a cache of letters written by Anne Frank's father, Otto. The roughly 80 documents, including considerable correspondence from Otto Frank to friends, family and officials, reveal just how desperately Mr. Frank—who survived the Holocaust—was trying to save his wife Edith, his mother-in-law Rosa Hollander and his daughters Margot and Anne...

Revamped N.Y. museum opens permanent space for civil rights exhibitions

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